Wednesday, 2 July 2014
Facebook "accidentally" launched a new app developed to rival Snapchat earlier than planned today, before quickly removing it from the App Store. The Slingshot app was briefly visible in the App Store in certain countries, such as Malaysia, but was quickly removed. Facebook later confirmed that the release was “accidental”.
The social networking giant first tried to push an ephemeral messaging service
– often disparagingly called a ‘sexting app’ – in 2012, when it released
Poke. Users had long been able to ‘poke’ each other on the Facebook website, but
this standalone app allowed users to send text, photos or videos and set a
time limit on how long they would be viewable by the recipient. Once the
time limit was up, the message was deleted.
Unfortunately for Facebook, it wasn’t a huge success and disappeared almost as
quickly as one of its messages.
